Intel’s Nova Lake household was first leaked in 2021 and, again then, it was purported to launch in 2025 with a closely redesigned Core structure for the desktop fanatic market, just like how first gen Ryzen improved efficiency for AMD. No different updates for this household have been made within the meantime, however now, sources near Moore’s Regulation Is Useless declare that Nova Lake continues to be within the works and its launch window by some means bought pushed to H2 2026. MLID additionally offers some tentative specs that aren’t in all probability set in stone given the superior time horizon.
Though Intel stated that reliance on TSMC’s manufacturing nodes ought to finish by 2025, it appears to be like like Nova Lake might nonetheless partially be constructed on TSMC’s N2P nodes if not totally on Intel’s successor of the 18A node (MLID calls it 14A). All of it relies on how nicely Intel’s angstrom nodes can ramp up within the subsequent few years.
For now, Nova Lake is about to function as much as 16 rentable unit (new hyperthreading tech) efficiency cores + 32 improved effectivity cores codenamed Arctic Wolf + 4 low energy effectivity cores. This core rely ought to present sufficient efficiency to compete with no matter comes after AMD’s Zen6 processors in 2026, with 20-40% single-thread efficiency features over Arrow Lake, and a whooping 60+% enchancment over the upcoming Raptor Lake Refresh. Excessive-end Core Extremely 9 processors are anticipated to combine as a lot as 180 MB of final stage cache, whereas Core Extremely 7 fashions might stand up to 144 MB.
From what we now have discovered through MLID’s earlier leaks, AMD is prone to launch its Zen6 processors in late 2025, whereas Zen7 may launch in 2027. If Intel launches Nova Lake in late 2026, it will really attempt to catch up and dethrone Zen6, not Zen7, so Intel’s launch schedule may very well be considerably desynced and find yourself one step behind AMD for the subsequent few years.
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I first stepped into the wondrous IT&C world after I was round seven years previous. I used to be immediately fascinated by computerized graphics, whether or not they had been from video games or 3D purposes like 3D Max. I am additionally an avid reader of science fiction, an astrophysics aficionado, and a crypto geek. I began writing PC-related articles for Softpedia and some blogs again in 2006. I joined the Notebookcheck workforce in the summertime of 2017 and am presently a senior tech author principally protecting processor, GPU, and laptop computer information.
